Naghmeh Shafiei Won’t Be Gentled Down
Photo by Martin Savoie
When I first met Naghmeh Shafei, I knew her as a friend of a friend, a great dog-mom, and a welcoming soul. I had no idea that she was an extraordinary musician, self-aware and ready to disrupt expectations. Seeing her perform live this summer was a transforming moment, one of those rare times in life when someone you kind of know puts their superhero outfit on right in front of you, and your mind is blown. The chick’s a rockstar, and I knew I had to dive deeper.
I ask Naghmeh if music has always been a vital part of her life, and she tells me that she didn’t originally see it that way. "It's such an important question because I remember I was sitting down with a friend that had been a friend for the last decade…and they asked 'what do you want to be when you grow up?'. I didn't even hesitate. Suddenly I was that little girl in Iran that was mouthing the words to English songs that I didn't understand. And my friend laughed and said 'well, from now on everything you do should be in service of that'." Despite her obvious passion and outside encouragement, she still wasn't convinced. Like so many artists, she didn't feel worthy of the art. "Mais non," she told her friend. "Music is something other people do. I can't do music, I can't be a rockstar, that's just for the next generation of kids. I think that's when the idea planted in my head."
Naghmeh has played guitar since she was a teenager. "Lugging" it with her wherever she went, from doing her master's in Vancouver to her stint in San Francisco. At a point it began gathering dust. "It had been under my bed for some time. I had just started playing music again, and one day I was sitting with a friend, singing and playing at the same time. They said it was really beautiful and asked who wrote it. Like, I wrote it! And I think that was another time that really helped me unlock this part of my brain. It really felt tangible. Then I just kept writing music. I was travelling for work a lot, going from city to city, and I was spending a lot of time alone in random places. Instead of sitting at the bar alone, I bought a travel guitar. I would go to parks in different cities, and just try writing songs. That first year I wrote 20 songs in six months."
Once she chose to say yes to her life as a musician, things began to transform. "I started going to open mics. The dream kept evolving and I went from thinking that's never gonna happen, to, okay, you can do this. You can do this seriously, you can do it however you want. This is just a part of your life now. It's been such an interesting journey ever since. I've revisited this dream as ten different drafts, so there have been different chapters. Naghmeh and The Southern Shores was a really big chapter. It was the chapter where I wanted to prove to myself that I can build a portfolio, play with a band, record and really enhance it…I loved that project. It was basically the story of how my life imploded in San Francisco. I decided to move back to Montreal, so a lot of those songs were about coming to the realization that I just didn't want to live in the US anymore. I wanted to come back home. But l wanted to have help to make the decision -- just waiting for signs. Then all of the signs just came like slapping me in the face, like get the hell out of here."
Her boyfriend at that time left her, and a week later she was laid off. When her dad called to ask what she planned on doing, she was setting up a hammock on a Californian beach with her notebook, and she told him she was going to write a song. She wanted to process the experience before returning to Montreal. "So Dot Dot Dot was written in this state of utter sadness and confusion. And then I was like, That is not how I feel anymore about that." Naghmeh returned to Montreal right in time for her father's birthday, and to this day Dot Dot Dot is one of her favourite songs she's written.
Her bandmates from The Southern Shores moved away, and she calls that chapter "very beautifully concluded. I'm not tying myself to the idea of a band. I'm performing the songs that are written by me, so I want to be flexible to play solo. I want to be flexible, to play with a band, and to have a moody, dark vibe."
While it's the Southern Shores album I've been listening to, that isn't what I heard her do when I caught her live at ATSA's Cuisine Ta Ville. There she performed with her new collaborators, Arthur and Adrian, giving old school riot grrrl vibes, 90’s grunge straight to my corduroy heart. She laughs when I say as much. "YES! I was really into Nirvana growing up, she says. "And Alanis Morissette, and Metallica."
In the Cuisine Ta Ville set she also did a mesmerizing song that added weight to her performance. She announced it by explaining how in Iran women aren't allowed to sing in public. "It was the first song I wrote in Farsi. The idea was to honour Jina Mahsa Amini." I ask if she always carries that with her, if when she takes the stage she feels the legion of ancestral spirits behind her, women who never had the chance to share their voices.
"Definitely. It's so interesting: I think it was something that I didn't realize. Music is super, super hard, but I always felt like it was harder for me. I heard a lot of comments like 'you're actually really good', and I didn't really know what to make of it. you know? I just always thought I was actually really good. There was this expectation: because I look this way, because I present this way, I think people expect me to sing in Farsi, or expect me to make more mellow music and then when they're like encountered with the rock -- there's a little bit of a desire to gentle you down."
Sheepishly I admit that I'd also assumed she played chill, acoustic music. "I really love when people get that surprise," she laughs.
I wonder about her range. Does her mood dictate the song's style? Is it the lyrics that decide the vibe? "I have been influenced by so many different musicians. I'm 37 now, so I recognize that there's been different eras of my own musical take. I listened to Feist, Florence and The Machine, just like I listened to the dreamy tunes of Patrick Watson, and electronic music. My local heroes are Dominique Fils-Aimé, Hanorah, Lea Keeley and Oli Page. I also really dig Po Lazarus.
Fundamentally, in the chicken-and-egg of songwriting, it’s her writing that comes first. "I've always written as a way for myself to make sense of what's happening in life, so writing has always been super present. I've recently gotten into free form poetry writing, and that's something I'm enjoying more and more. Sometimes with songwriting you think so much about what should be the hook, what should be the bridge, what's going to be catchy, whereas writing, first and foremost, was supposed to be for me. Somewhere along the way I found I'd temporarily lost that pleasure of just writing and playing music for me. It became about performing, the next performance, the next big thing, and 'making it' as a musician. But I wasn't sure if I was enjoying it anymore. I wasn't sure if I was doing it for the sake of just loving music. And that made me sad, because music has been such an important part of my healing…music has always been the only constant in my life…I basically had a reality check.
My body forced me to stop doing things for the sake of productivity, for the sake of hustling. It encouraged me to find the people who make me feel at home, who literally came to my house because I just couldn't carry anything heavier than a water glass. That's where this new collaboration with Arthur and Adrian actually came about. I had people who were willing to take the metro, come all the way to my house in deep 'Shlag, schlep their stuff across town, and hang out. When I complained about things like, oh, I can’t sit comfortably, my back hurts, that again made me really self conscious, because I was very aware that I'm asking people to help me perform my songs and I'm asking guests to come all the way to me. And I have physical limitations as to how much I can perform, how long I can perform, and what I could offer. And that's where I realized that people just enjoy playing music with me to the point that they're willing to put up with all these restrictions of mine, they're willing to build again with me and to rebuild a new project."
In line with those lessons, she recently read Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, and thinks a lot of creatives will be able to relate to its message. "She talks about how after an accomplishment, we're like, was that accomplishment successful? And we wonder about what is success? Isn't just putting an album out there successful enough? Isn't it enough to accomplish your goal? I think as artists and creatives sometimes there's so much pressure on what the outcome should be. And the outcome should just be to make you happy, to fulfil your dreams. You did it, you did the thing. Don't just skim through your accomplishments, don't minimize it, enjoy it. Also recognize that you're committed to a lifelong journey with Art, don't put so much pressure on it. So these are things that I keep on reminding myself. My goal isn't to write a hit song, it would be awesome if my music gets heard by a lot of people, but to remove that psychological pressure, I think it's really important for creatives. Enjoy the process, don't make yourself sick. That's a thing that artists don't talk a lot about: we suffer a lot in silence. A lot of us suffer from mood disorders, from attention disorders...And we're like, oh my god, I have to make this depression into something beautiful. I have to write a beautiful sad song…And actually you can just write a sad song for yourself so that music can move you, and that's enough. If music can help you, that's enough. If music can help one other person, that's life changing. If somebody hears your music, and feels wow, I'm not alone, the impact you have on that one person's life shouldn't just be brushed off. And I think sometimes I forget that."
Naghmeh is ramping up for a busy fall. Keep your eyes on McSweeney’s List for her upcoming news and releases, and come say hi to me at her shows. I will definitely be there, cheering loudly. She is a rockstar after all.
Photo by Adam Nigro
